26 OCTOBER 2017 Chinese Delivery Drones China Focus: JD.com Is Beating Amazon at the Delivery Drone Game JingDong (aka JD.com) has been aggressively developing its drone capabilities ever since they first announced their intention to use delivery drones in October 2015. Earlier this year, they boldly announced plans to establish 150 operational sites for delivery drones in the province of Sichuan over a three year span. By June they had already conducted test flights. As of October, according to their recently released YouTube video, their delivery drones have logged in a total of 30,821 minutes in flight time, delivered 8,086 packages and flown a total of 10,242 km (6,364 mi). By comparison, Amazon (who was the first to amaze us back in 2013 with the whole delivery drone concept) seems to still be stuck in the testing stage. They only recently conducted their first proof-of-concept flight in Cambridge, England this past December. So what do China’s delivery drones look like? How will they be used and what does the future hold for them? The JD.com delivery drone fleet circa 2016. Source: JD.com The JD.com Delivery Drone Fleet As of June 2017, JD.com had seven (7) different types of delivery drones in testing or operation across four provinces in China (Beijing, Sichuan, Shaanxi and Jiangsu). The drones are capable of delivering packages weighing between 5 to 30 kg (11 to 66 lbs) while flying up to 100 km/hr (62 mph). The drones do not deliver goods directly to people’s homes. Rather, they automatically fly along fixed routes from warehouses to special landing pads where one of JD.com’s 300,000 local contractors then deliver the packages to the customers’...

Mail delivery robot “assistant” will automatically follow postal workers in Germany PostBOT is an all-weather, ground-based drone that will accompany postal workers along their delivery routes. It can carry up to 150 kg (330 lb) of mail and packages. The robot was designed with considerable input from Deutsche Post personnel and was built by the French company Effidence which won the DHL Robotics Challenge last year. The main goal of this mail-toting machine is to ease the physical challenge of the job even as the postal workers continue to age. The current version of PostBOT is 150 cm (4 ft 11 inches) tall and can travel at speeds of up to 6 km/h (3.7 mph). In case you are wondering how the four-wheeled mail delivery bot will handle steps, well, according to The Postal Hub there are no steps in Bad Hersfeld where the six week trial is set to begin later this year. It will be interesting to see how PostBOT will interact with the Parcelcopter, DHL’s tiltwing delivery...

28 SEPTEMBER, 2016 Pizza Delivery Drones Mamma Mia! Will full-scale pizza drone delivery services be the next big thing? This past August, pizza powerhouse Domino’s made history by announcing it was trialling pizza deliveries via drone in New Zealand. Check out the video of the successful delivery here. Experimentation with drone deliveries is nothing new for Domino’s. In 2013 they did a promotional stunt in the UK (video link: YouTube) and just this past June they did something similar in Greece (video link: YouTube) while also showcasing a prototype of their future “zero click ordering” app with a 10-second countdown. This time around however, Domino’s has partnered up with Flirtey, the company who this past year alone has trialled drone delivery of medical supplies as well as drone delivery of 7-Eleven goodies such as coffee, donuts, a chicken sandwich and a Slurpee. This partnership is part of Domino’s long-term strategy to automate delivery alongside the company’s future fleet of 190 kg (419 lb) Domino’s Robotic Units (aka DRUs) which are the company’s (potentially solar powered) commercial autonomous delivery vehicles ready to deliver up to 10 hot pizza pies within a 20 km (12.4 mile) radius of their home franchise base. Is Domino’s the first to come up with this concept of flying pizzas? No. But they are most likely the first to be able to make it happen at a commercial level. University students and their supervisor in Berlin work on devouring the first pizza successfully delivered via drone back in 2012. Screen capture via YouTube Pizza Drones Then Leonardo The Pizza Delivery Copter (Germany, 2012) A Free University of Berlin student project, this...

27 JUNE, 2016 Postal Delivery Drones With the rapid demise of snail mail and the explosive double digit growth of e-Commerce, postal companies have been forced to seek new ways to expand beyond their traditional letter delivery business models. Given the online consumer’s expectation of fast parcel delivery, it is not surprising that many of these postal service companies are now turning towards delivery drone technology to remain afloat. This article focuses on the recent activities different postal companies from Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore and Ukraine have undertaken as they test the feasibility and profitability of unmanned delivery drone services. Although the general consensus is that it will still take a while for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to become the defacto parcel delivery mode given a variety of existing obstacles (e.g. consumer expectations, end recipient safety, threat of theft, regulatory frameworks, battery life limitation, etc.), the current trend does indeed point to a time where Fido won’t be able to savor the mailman’s leg. The Australia Post parcel delivery drone in action. Photograph by Eddie Jim via the Sydney Morning Herald Australia Post In 2015 Australia Post reported their first full year loss in over 30 years of operation. Their AU$222 million (US$171 million) loss was a dramatic change compared to their AU$116.2 million (US$89.72 million) profit in 2014. What they did see however was that although letter volumes fell by 7.3%, parcel revenue rose by 3.6%. Ever since then, this government owned postal company down under has been quite active in the testing of delivery drone usage “It is not a matter of if, but rather of when” This...

Drone package deliveries at less than 0.5 yuan (7.6 U.S. cents) per parcel Chinese delivery drones with a payload of 10-15 kg are currently operating in Suqian City, China – JD[dot]com has two drones capable of handling 200 parcels a day. With a range of 15 to 20 km at a speed of up to 54 km per hour, the drones automatically load and unload goods between depots rather than delivering directly to customers. >>> http://bit.ly/1Ua69bT #deliverydrones...